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John Lurie & the Lounge Lizards: Strange and Beautiful Strange and beautiful. Besides describing the music and persona of Lounge Lizards frontman John Lurie, "Strange and Beautiful" is also the name of his new record label. Once again, he's trying to beat the system with his own bizarre methodology (remember his late night infomercials for 1990's Voice of Chunk, The Lounge Lizards' 1-800 phone/mail-order only release?). "We
closed it down eventually - it kinda worked, but kinda didn't," Lurie
muses on the 1-800 concept. "But now there's the web you know, everything's
on the web..." (John's website: "strangeandbeautiful.com") The ORIGINAL punk rock Renaissance Man (he's an indie film star to boot - The Last Temptation of Christ, Wild at Heart, Jim Jarmusch's films), Lurie's going on two decades of taking on The Man. So much so that he's kept himself out of the limelight for a number of years - while discreetly garnering recognition (like a 1997 Grammy nomination for the Get Shorty soundtrack) left and right. So, why've you been hiding these past few years, I ask him. "You know - I just hit the wall with all these unbelievable legal disasters," Lurie explains. "I had a manager and a lawyer who did really bizarre stuff, and it took me two years to get out of that mess. And then finally when it was all over, I made the horrible mistake of signing and getting totally fucked over by David 'The Artist" Byrne's label Luaka Bop, at Warner Bros. - another horrible mess." "I was mostly trying to get my work back - THAT'S what I was doing." And so, Strange and Beautiful was born, and Lurie has returned to doing things his own way. After nearly two decades of leading the wildly diverse Lounge Lizards collective - whose alumni include Anton Fier, Marc Ribot, Arto Lindsay, John Medeski and Billy Martin (Medeski, Martin, and Wood) - this purveyor of hip and funny erraticism remains as schizo as he is gifted. Most recently, Lurie split his identity into the semblances of John the Fishing Guy and John the Musician. Lurie's new TV series, Fishing With John airs this month on the Independent Film Channel - following him on whirlwind fishing expeditions all over the world with friends like Dennis Hopper and Matt Dillon. Simultaneously, the Lounge Lizards just released their first new full-length album in seven years, Queen of all Ears. Why fishing? "There's something that's just so magical about fishing," Lurie reflects. "Let's say you are in a boat and you're over this water, and there's the surface of the water, and you can't see beneath the surface. And right beneath the surface are these beautiful creatures that you can bring into your world." The brilliant Fishing With John soundtrack is akin to some of Lurie's film scores (particularly Down By Law and Stranger Than Paradise) in its noir-ish weirdness and sparsity. It also resembles the Lounge Lizards in spirit (highlights include crooning with Tom Waits in Jamaica, and choral numbers like "Fish Dance"). "As an idea for a show, I liked fishing because you could kind of have an adventure thing," Lurie explains. "You'd disarm the guests because they'd have a task to do that they concentrate on, and thus become themselves while they're being filmed, rather than just sitting there and have all their defenses up." As for his
musical roots, Queen of all Ears finds the Lounge Lizards circa one decade
ago - punk jazz shot straight from the hip of Thelonious Monk, steered
by Lurie's dry wit and distinctive, Jello Biafra-like ramblings. With
an ever-evolving line-up, the Lounge Lizards currently includes eight
other members and comes across as being more structured than Live in Berlin
and No Pain for Cakes. This structure, Lurie claims, is misleading. Lurie says of his sax solos on the new album (Flea, as in Lurie's friend who plays in the Red Hot Chili Peppers). "Basically the whole eight other members of the band become the whole rhythm section for the soloist. But then there's this whole structure behind them that takes it from A to B, you know?" Fairly simple, and almost catchy at times, Lurie's alto/soprano sax-driven melodies anchor thematic song structures, and often climax like a cartoon score. The Lounge Lizards' improvisational dynamic renders differently in the studio. As Lurie explains, their brand of jazz doesn't always cross over in their recordings. "A rock band with four guys can maybe be loud on a record and it kind of works, but something like this where there's nine [players] - frequencies start canceling each other out, and you just can't fit it on there." He continues: "I find what killed jazz was indulgence. So I really try to set up barriers to keep it moving, you know?" One dynamic which a recording couldn't document is Lurie's riveting live energy. "A lot of people faint at our shows," he tells me. "It's not, like, guaranteed that ten people are going to faint, but I'll hear from a friend, "Hey John, there was this woman standing next to me at the show, and she passed out." The man himself has had "metaphysical experiences" during performances ("It has something to do with light in the brain, but I don't know how to explain. It's not something that I move towards consciously..."). Lurie stops midway. "You can't put this stuff into words," he insists. "Some people can. I guess Jesus was pretty good at it. But I can't, I don't have those skills - I play music. Music is a way of articulating an experience." |